BookBar Blog

David Mason - Reading and Signing

Join BookBar in welcoming former Poet Laureate David Mason for a reading and signing! He'll read from two books!

In The Sound: New and Selected Poems David Mason collects his best short work from the past 40 years.

In Voices, Places: Essays David Mason explores the relationships between literature and location, exile and the life of art.

More about The Sound:

In The Sound acclaimed poet David Mason collects his best shorter work of the past forty years, including lyrics like “Song of the Powers” and darkly brilliant narratives, “The Collector’s Tale” and “The Country I Remember,” which Anthony Hecht called “A welcome addition to the best that is now being written by American poets.” A poet of love and history and nature, Mason forges a language that can reconnect us to the world.

More about Voices, Places:

“How are voices like places? They move through us as we move through them.”

Celebrated poet David Mason explores surprising connections in geography and time, considering writers who traveled, who emigrated or were exiled, and who often shaped the literature of their homelands. He writes of seasoned travelers (Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Joseph Conrad, Herodotus himself), and writers as far flung as Omar Khayyam, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, James Joyce, and Les Murray. In the end, he turns to his own native region, the American West, with Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, Robinson Jeffers, Belle Turnbull, and Thomas McGrath.

These essays are about familiarity and estrangement, the pleasure and knowledge readers can gain by engaging with writers’ lives, their travels, their trials, and the homes they make for themselves.